@FumbleFingers I think it quite possible that the Canonical Post will end up as a series of individual posts, to keep it from becoming overwhelmingly long - but just how that is to be accomplished should be discussed here. In the meantime ...
... the outline I have in mind will include for each type of perfect construction (present perfect, past perfect, future perfect, perfect infinitive, perfect participle-gerund) a discussion of 1. When MUST I use it, 2. When MAY I use it, and 3. When may I NOT use it.
... This will certainly include an exposition of FumbleFingers Perfect Truism! - and it has become obvious as I work through the 110 questions (as of last week - more have come up since) that I will be quoting large swathes of your answers (and Wendi's and others'), and providing links to specific questions.
Generally, I think the point of the CP, whatever its final form, is to provide a point of first resort, so that answerers don't have to search through 100+questions to say "aspects of this have been discussed HERE and HERE and HERE", but can go directly to the CP, look at the outline at the front, and scroll down to an overview and a list of related questions.
@StoneyB: When I posted my answer on meta it seemed to me this issue had gone off the boil. If you're still working on it then don't worry about me jumping the gun (it's highly unlikely I'll ever get 10 upvotes to my answer, even by the end of the year! :).
...but I still think things will get overcomplex if we put everything in a single page. For example, if you try to cover Past and Present Perfect at the same time, much of what you have to include would probably apply to non-Perfect constructions too.
@FumbleFingers @FumbleFingers I agree entirely with the complexity issue, and part of what I'm wrestling with is dividing the question up into distinct and not-too-interconnected chunks which are related to the questions people are actually asking, not to abstract academic explication - though I'm afraid there's going to have to be some of the AAE, too; but I'll be trying to do that in Short Answer/Long Answer/Horribly Long Answer format, suited to different learning levels.
For that reason, I'm also looking at current textbooks and literature on pedagogy, to get a sense of how the subject is being taught.
@StoneyB Well, you're obviously beavering away, and I wouldn't want to end up being just a distracting voice buzzing in your ear. But I will just say that the Wikipedia section on Perfect constructions looks like a good starting point to me...
It has the advantage of being accessible to everyone (and probably completely trustworthy, in that unlike many Wikipedia pages it has no warnings about provenance/references/etc.) My idea would be to assume every user has or will read and understand that, and focus on expanding specific sub-issues that arise on ELL more than once. But I realise you've probably already gone much further than that.
@FumbleFingers Yes, I've generally found the Wikipedia linguistic articles both accessible and accurate. What's missing there is the learner slant-- the Wikipedia audience is tacitly assumed to know the language already--and Useful Rules like the FFPT.
@StoneyB, @FumbleFingers Breaking it up into smaller posts is a great idea. We can do that, and then have another post which compiles a list of all of them. We can begin posting these as you finish them, if you like, or if you'd prefer to keep them until they're all complete that's fine too :) So for the canonical post question itself a short intro into the series can be added to the question, and then the links to all of the separate posts.
